Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

Nothing’s gone, not really. Everything that’s ever happened has left its little wound.

the only real truth I could tell them is that sometimes there is a switch, and the world is turned upside down.

I think in another life I could have been a pathological liar, a professional one.

because sometimes we return to what we recognize, whether we want it or not.

I have always been a sort of archivist, glutting myself on what has been left behind.

Nobody, at the beginning, believes they will debase themselves for love. Nobody believes in anything else but joy.

A book hangs around, but an image is just a moment.

I’ve been looked at in pity and in fear and I’ve learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive. Please look at me. I promise you that I am here.

Both the person seeking absolution and the one providing it can be called the same name.

But you, Violet—you have never been denied or walked out on. You will always find a desire reciprocated, no matter how bleak. And in the end, that’s just another thing I can’t forgive.

He’s seen the evil that human beings are capable of enacting upon each other, she said. I know that can be hard for most people to come to terms with about him. But it might be that you need people less after that, knowing what they’re capable of. He has me, and that’s enough.

It’s hard to tell what an image will come to mean, what a person will mean, when you are still seeing it for the first time, and some things you always see as if for the first time.

The kitchen boy laughed about me with his friends. It hurt me but it also taught me that humiliation can make you feel alive, it can make you come alive. Though you can’t be indiscriminate, you can’t keep heaping shame upon yourself and expect to get out intact.

I am learning that the unexplainable moments can be the most beautiful ones of all. These things seen and not-seen, things heard and misheard, the flimsiness we build entire lives around. Perfect bread, a man who wanted to start a new life, a town bewitched. The ordinary and the sordid nestling together.